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Monday, July 18, 2016

The Best New Series: Bad Machinery

Wow, what a month! We had family in town for Benjamin's baptism, then the computer monitor died. On the day we got a new monitor, the internet went down. Once that began to get resolved I left for a week of church Young Women's Camp (read:no internet) HA! So while I've had a lot of fun and some frustration, this blog has been a little neglected. How have YOU been?

Today I wanted to start telling you about one of my new favorite series. It is Bad Machinery, by John Allison.

Hopefully soon I'll have an interview with John Allison himself for you! And that is just so exciting to me.

When my friend Ashlee asked me for a book recommendation recently, I thought long and hard about it and Bad Machinery came out on top. See, she's back in school and needed something fun to read, to relax with. Usually she loves non-fiction, but her textbooks were enough on that front. I know she loves the humor of The Office, and she loved The True Meaning of Smekday. If you like The Office and Smekday, Bad Machinery is on the right track.

I recommended that Ashlee start with book 2 in the series, The Case of the Good Boy. That's the book I started with, and I was hooked. I had my mom start with book one, The Case of the Team Spirit, and she wasn't immediately on board. I think The Case of the Good Boy is a little more cohesive? So now I recommend it as a starting place. It's the one I started with, and I treated book one as a prequel.

Here are all the books, in order.

Book 1: The Case of the Team Spirit

Book 2: The Case of the Good Boy

Book 3: The Case of The Simple Soul

Book 4: The Case of the Lonely One

Book 5: The Case of the Fire Inside

Book 6: The Case of the Unwelcome Visitor (pre-order until Nov 29, 2016)

Cases 6, 7, and 8 are available to read online (In fact ALL of the stories are available online, here) but like I say, the books are even better in print than online. Why? Because they're easier to read, there are extra pages, and the drawings have been re-worked just slightly to make them even better. In my opinion, the paper versions are worth it. In fact that's one reason I reached out to Oni Press and asked if I could work with them on promoting the series. I love that they're available online, and I love that the books are even better. The publisher sent me books 3,4,and 5 (Yay! it was SUCH fun to get that package.) and like I mentioned earlier, an interview with John Allison is in the works.

I hope you give these books a shot. I hope you encourage your library to buy them. More libraries need to have them, in my opinion.

Hit me with any questions you have for the author, or just any questions you have in general. See you soon!

1 comment:

oh! I wanted to read these, at least #2, when I was at your house. sigh! I have been waiting for that because, like you said - #1 just sort of left me needing a little more of the story to feel into it.